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Kalougas
Place in a copper basin two pounds fine sugar, a pint thick cream and teaspoon kummel. Set basin on the fire and constantly stir with wooden spoon until mixture attains a tan colour, drop on a clean marble, let slightly cool off, cut in small squares, and it will then be ready for use.
This is a cream caramel in the older confectioner's sense: sugar and cream boiled together to a set stage, poured out, and cut. The recipe gives no temperature, which is the one thing a modern cook needs.
- Cook to a number, not a colour"Tan colour" is an unreliable guide once cream is in the pan, since the dairy browns before the sugar reaches setting stage. Use a thermometer: about 245-250F gives a caramel firm enough to cut into squares, while 240F stays soft and sticky.
- The copper basinAn unlined copper sugar pan conducts evenly and has no seams for crystals to catch in. Any heavy pan with a thick base works, but make it deeper than you think — the mixture climbs sharply when the cream boils.
- MeasuresTwo pounds of sugar is about 4.5 cups; a pint of thick cream is 2 cups. "Thick cream" here means heavy or double cream, 36 percent fat or more, not anything soured or clotted.
- KummelA caraway-flavoured liqueur, still made and sold. A teaspoon in this quantity is a background note rather than a flavour; much of the alcohol and aroma will cook off during the boil, so add it at the end if you want the aroma to survive.
- Constant stirringWith dairy in the pan this is not optional advice. Milk solids scorch on the base if the pan is left unattended, and a burnt patch will taint the whole batch.
- The marbleOil or butter the slab, and set metal bars or a shallow oiled tin to contain the pour, or the caramel will run thin and wide. A cold marble surface is what allows the sheet to cool evenly enough to cut.
- CuttingMark and cut while the sheet is still warm and just firm — roughly the point where a fingerprint holds its shape. Cold caramel shatters or defeats the knife.
- YieldAbout two and a half pounds of finished caramels; the number of squares depends on how thickly the sheet is poured. Wrap them individually in waxed paper; unwrapped, they weld into a block.
Filippini's book gathers dishes under national labels, and this one belongs to the run of European confectionery that a large hotel kitchen was expected to turn out for the petits fours tray and the after-dinner service. The technique itself is standard French confectioner's practice: sugar and cream boiled in unlined copper, poured on marble, cut in squares. Cream caramels of this kind spread through hotel and restaurant kitchens in the second half of the nineteenth century. The absence of any temperature in the instructions is characteristic of the period: a chef judged the stage by eye, by colour, and by dropping a bead of syrup into cold water, and the recipe assumes a reader who already knew how.